Updated every Monday, Wednesday and Friday ... and maybe other days too.

Friday, July 25, 2008

Cornered

The righthand corner, as we all know, should always be occupied by a light square. But does anybody know how long that has been the case? Since chess took on its current form around five hundred years ago? Before then? After? How long has it been the convention that the righthand corner has been light, and how long has it been part of the offical and accepted Laws of Chess?

God, for a moment there I wondered if that was me, because I can remember doing precisely that somewhere (I chose the Closed Lopez because I play it, and because you can get quite a long way without taking any pieces off the board).

However, I've not been to Chesham for about thirty years, and thinking about it I may have been using a big outdoor chess set in a pub in Letchworth....

I would think that the longest theoretical sequences in which all pieces remain on the board are to be found in the Classical King's Indian - thus these would be ideal for this kind of joke (shop assistants being likely to put captured pieces back on the board.)

Btw, surprisingly often I do actually set up the board wrong, eg switched king and queen, black on the right, that kind of thing. Not sure why.

This is the image Adam refers to above: to be honest it looks all right to me. Am I missing something or is Mr Pert's watch behind the black king making it harder to see and perhaps giving the impression that it's the queen?

If we're looking for idiots who don't notice when the king and queen are transposed, I can fulfill that role personally, as I failed to do so in a recent game in the Benasque Open. (My IM opponent noticed on about move four.)

I do wonder, in retrospect, whether the lady in the top image in the original piece had the board set up perfeftly correctly, but the photo got reversed by somebody else. (Not me, I hasten to add).

Well, as it happens, today's update on the 1.e4 e5 section of the ChessPublishing site includes a game Timofeev - Azarov from the European Championships at Plovdiv in which the first exchange is made on move 27. It was a Breyer.